Scared Shitless

By Charles Vander Vennet

"Dad, can I ask you a question?" my son, Matt, asks me as we cruise along I-95 on the Richmond to D.C. leg of our trip from Virginia Beach.

"Sure, son. What is it?" I reply, reading the big green sign on the side of the road telling me it's fifty miles to Washington.

"How did you and mom meet? I mean, when did you two realize you were meant to be?"

Matt was about to turn sixteen and had never asked me a question like this before so I wasn't prepared to answer him.

"Well, I can only tell you my side of the story. You'll have to ask mom her side when we get back home in a few days. It might differ slightly from mine. And since I think you're mature enough, I'm not going to hold back any details."

"Okay, dad," he said, looking up at me as his brown, scruffy hair fell in front of his big brown eyes.

"It didn't happen all at once like in those romance movies your mom watches, but rather it took a couple of events to get everything to fall into place. It all started on a sunny summer afternoonÖ"

Jacob called me around ten o'clock the morning of the accident. I remember it being a beautiful day, and that's why he wanted to go swimming at the pond down the road. I whole-heartedly agreed to his plan of a day in the sun. He told me to meet Lindsay and him at the pond. As I headed downstairs, I couldn't wait for a day in the sun with my friends.

Jacob, Lindsay and I were best friends. We met because our mothers were friends. They worked together at the elementary school. Jacob and I had been on the same Little League team when we were in third grade, and now we played on the high school's team. Lindsay and I had a lot in common. We liked the same movies and were never without a book in our hands. Lindsay was my first crush, so I tried to spend as much time as I could with her. From as far back as my memory goes, there wasn't a day I didn't spend with one of my two friends. Some days were good, and some days were bad. Today was a little of both.

It took me about half an hour to get ready and scarf down the sausage and eggs my mom made me. She told me to be careful on the rope swing. Someone had hung it from a branch over the pond.

"Of course, Mom," I replied. That's what I always said when she told me to be careful around something, and subconsciously I meant it, but usually I was too disinterested to reply with anything nice. She was always worried about me, even if I were taking an innocent bath. I found out later that her psychic told her a close family member would die from an accident. It turned out to be her brother – he was killed in a train crash years after I went away to college, and after that, my mom stopped worrying about me.

I flew through the screen door, down the porch stairs, and started to sprint up the old dirt road of the small rural community outside of Savannah, Georgia. About fifty feet down the road, I heard the screen door slam shut and something crash to the floor. I'm going to get an earful for that, I thought as I bounded down the road.

Rocky banks encircled the little pond. The pond was set far enough from the road that you couldn't see it during the spring and summer because of the densely clustered oak trees that packed the surrounding area up to the banks. The rocks at the edge of the water were green from the algae that had washed up. Not many people swam here because they thought the algae would get in their way, but the three of us didn't care. We just wanted to swim and have a good time.

I got to the pond just as Jacob hit the water after jumping from the rope swing. His splash rained down on the blanket they brought so we'd have somewhere to sit. Lindsay was sitting on the blanket, and she cringed as the first cold droplet hit her skin.

"Hey! Lindsay! Did you see that? Did you see how big my splash was?" asked Jacob, panting for breath as he climbed up the rocky slope.

"No, but I sure did feel it," she replied. "My turn!" she shouted after she realized she could get her revenge then and there.

I sat down on the blanket next to Jacob, and we talked about what Tarzan movie we were going to watch on Saturday as Lindsay mounted the swing for her first turn. Jacob and Lindsay had only gotten there a few moments before I had.

I watched her skin, tanned from the summer sun, and her blond hair, which trailed behind her, as she pushed off the edge and out over the water. I knew trouble was coming when I saw she was trying to hold on with only one hand, like in the old Tarzan movies we watched sometimes on Saturday nights.

Just as I remembered how Tarzan called his animal friends, Lindsay let out a scream that echoed off the trees as she fell to the rocky bank below. Jacob and I rushed over to the edge of the grass and saw her body lying on the rocks. There was a pool of blood beginning to take shape around her arm, and I could see that the bone in her forearm had broken through her skin.

I told Jacob to run and get some help. He ran as fast as his spindly legs could carry him, and I climbed down the slope to check on Lindsay. I tried to be as careful as possible as I stepped from one wet, wobbly stone to another. I almost slipped on one of the rocks as I picked up the pace, since I couldn't see Lindsay moving.

I reached her body without any serious trouble or hurting myself in the process. Her arm was bleeding profusely. I had been in the Scouts, so I knew how to check if she still had a pulse. I put my pointer and middle finger against her jugular. To my horror, she had no pulse, but luckily Jacob showed up with the local doctor, who lived just down the street from the pond. The doctor was able to find her pulse. My time with the Scouts hadn't helped me much.

I always had a crush on Lindsay, but I thought it was only because we spent so much time together. When I saw her lying on those wet rocks, I cried. I realized that what I felt for Lindsay was more than just a crush. I couldn't bear to see Lindsay hurt in any way. My heart was pounding in fear that Lindsay was seriously injured. Because I loved Lindsay, I was scared shitless.

Lindsay spent the next few days in a Savannah hospital as they ran tests and made sure she was all right. She suffered a minor concussion along with the broken arm, which the doctor said would heal nicely. I visited Lindsay in the hospital every day, bringing her flowers each time.

I helped Lindsay in any way I could while her arm was in its cast. We became much closer friends because of the endless hours we spent together. Lindsay and I started dating soon afterwards, and the relationship blossomed quickly. Our relationship lasted until the end of senior year when Lindsay broke up with me because she had met someone else. She said they were in love. Though the break- up tore my heart out, I told Lindsay I was happy for her. She smiled and told me we'd stay friends, but for some reason I didn't believe her. It never works out the way you want it to.

We both enrolled at the Savannah College for Art and design, but I didn't see Lindsay the entire first semester or over winter break, so I thought that our friendship was over, but we ran into each other during second semester in an introductory photography class. I was pleasantly surprised to see her, and she seemed surprised to see me, but whether pleasantly, I couldn't be sure. After our accidental meeting, it was as if we had never spent time apart. She went with me on a few photography assignments, one of which was to capture the spiritual essence of an abandoned building.

For that assignment, we decided to meet for dinner at a pizza place down the street from my apartment near the Colonial Park Cemetery. We met up around seven and had a couple slices of greasy pizza before heading out to the old train storage building, which I learned about through a friend of mine in the city. After my friend told me about the building, I did some research on it.

The building had been a train storage facility. From the picture I found, it was four stories tall and looked like a factory from the early part of the century. On the longer sides, there were twelve windows on each floor except the first and second, which had four and a large door, which I guessed was how they got the trains in the building. Ten windows lined the walls on each floor of the shorter sides. It was a beautiful building, but the picture I saw was dated 1921. The website I got my information from said that the building hadn't been used since 1946.

It didn't take us long to get there, but the full moon, already overhead, cast an eerie glow on the decrepit warehouse. Some of the broken windows had been boarded shut. The underbrush suffocated the base of the building. Ivory vines infested the walls that were slowly deteriorating.

We had to find a place to get in since there was a padlock on the main door. We walked around the entire building before finding a window to climb through. I hoisted Lindsay up onto the ledge, and she slid into the building, but not without tearing her shirt on the broken glass.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. No scrapes or anything."

"Okay, well, I'm coming in," I said. I pulled myself up on the cold cement ledge and slid through the window, being careful not to catch my clothes on the glass.

The inside of the building was in worse shape than the outside. There were metal staircases at each end of the building; they were missing steps in certain places, and the rails had started to separate from the wall. The floor was covered in underbrush, some of which looked like poison ivy, which meant I had to be careful since I usually get an extreme allergic reaction to it. There were cracks in the floor in places that underbrush hadn't taken over. Moonlight was shining through the broken windows, and it left a spider web pattern on the walls and floor.

I told Lindsay I wanted to go one story higher so that I could try and find a place to take a photo of the pattern of the moonlight. She told me she was going to check out some of the plants in the underbrush down here, and that I should go ahead without her. I climbed the rickety metal stairs to the second floor, but couldn't find any place to take a picture from. I went up one more flight and found the perfect spot to take my picture, and I could see Lindsay looking at a large fern in the corner under one of the boarded up windows.

I set up my tripod and digital camera in the dark hallway, and although it was the middle of May, I could see my breath. For some inexplicable reason, I was freezing cold and goose bumps dotted my forearms. I had the eerie feeling someone was watching me from the end of the hall, but I ignored it and concentrated on my assignment.

I looked through the viewfinder of the camera and set up my shot for a five-minute exposure of my spider web. Lindsay was still examining the fern when I snapped my shot and stepped back to light a cigarette while the exposure finished. The wall was cool and damp, and a thin layer of condensation seeped through the back of my shirt. While taking in a long drag of my cigarette, I heard faint footsteps from the end of the hall near the stairs, so I went to see if Lindsay was coming up to join me, but she was still looking at the plants on the ground. When I listened harder, I realized the footsteps were going down the stairs and not up.

My heart was a ticking time bomb. The first thing that popped into my mind was that some sleazebag was going to find Lindsay all alone and try to harm her, so I raced down the hall towards the staircase. When I reached the staircase, I stopped and listened to figure out where the footsteps were. They sounded close and were moving slowly away from the staircase somewhere below me. It sounded like whoever was lurking in the building had a limp and heavy boots on. I could hear a swish-thunk, swish-thunk.

I scrambled down the stairs as fast as I could. The stairs swayed ferociously from side to side. I jumped the last four stairs on the way to the second level, in case I could scare the person away. My landing made a loud clang that echoed off the brick walls.

Wisps of my breath floated in front of my face as I stood at the end of the hallway. I was concentrating on anything and everything that I could see. The footsteps echoed down the dark hall, but I couldn't see what was making them. I started to creep down the corridor, trying to be as quiet as I could, feeling my way with my hand against the damp wall.

My fingers passed over a patch of moss, and I jumped from the change in texture. My heart was pounding so loudly that I thought maybe it was the source of the noises. I passed a window that looked out over the ground floor and saw Lindsay had moved to a different section of the building, but seemed not to have noticed anything strange going on.

The swish-thunk of the footsteps had stopped about fifty feet in front of me. I quickened my pace to make sure that the source of the footsteps hadn't escaped. I had to find out what was lurking in the shadows.

When I reached the end of the hallway, I became sick to my stomach. My body was telling me to vomit, but my mind wouldn't let me so I focused all of my energy and thought onto Lindsay and her safety. I had broken out in a cold sweat and was shaking violently from fear. I reached the end of the hall and found a staircase glowing with moonlight. There was a window in front of me. If there was anything in the hall, it had eluded me.

I could see Lindsay walking around the ground floor at the bottom of the stairway. She saw me and waved.

"Did you get your shot?" she shouted. Her words echoed loudly off the walls.

"Yeah, yeah. It's still going."

Lindsay ran up the steps to me so that we didn't have to shout. In the moonlight, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

In the distance, I heard the footsteps start up. I swallowed as I realized they were headed straight for us. My hands were balled into fists so tight that my nails began to break my skin. Lindsay's breath became visible, and so did mine. Our misty breath danced in the moonlight as our breathing got heavier.

"C-can we go now? This place is starting to creep me out," Lindsay said.

"Yeah, let me just grab my camera from upstairs." When I tried to walk away, Lindsay grabbed my arm.

"I'm not going down that hall. There's something down there, I know it.

I told her in a calm voice that everything would be all right. She let go of my arm and started to walk down the hall with me.

I was going toward the other end of the hallway again, when a mysterious force began to push me backwards. When I stopped so suddenly, Lindsay ran in fear to the staircase and began to go down. I tried pushing harder, but nothing I did seemed to move me forward. I was getting dangerously close to the window. I began to groan from the pressure I was putting on my legs; I felt as if a bulldozer stood in my way, and it was stuck in gear.

My boot heels hit the brick wall. Foolishly, I thought I was at a dead end, but the force kept pushing. Slowly, I began to bend backwards toward the panes of glass behind me, which amazingly hadn't been broken. I was groaning more and more as the force bent me backwards. My feet began slipping forward, and the force pushed me through the window with a loud crash. I fell from the second story and landed on a pile of stone underneath the windows.

As I was falling, I saw Lindsay appear at the window. She had her hands over her face. When she removed them, I was lying on the ground and had lost all feeling in my right arm. Lindsay's face was twisted in horror as she looked down on me. I gave her a sign of life as I mouthed for her to get out of there as fast as she could. I heard her run down the metal staircase and saw her climb out the window that we had used to get in.

When she got to my body, Lindsay reached into my front pocket to grab my cell phone. She dialed 911. An ambulance came shortly after and took us away from the haunted building. I had my arm put into a cast and stayed in it for about two months. Lindsay was nice enough to help me through those horrible months without the use of my arm. Eventually she told me what she had been feeling when she saw my broken body on the rocks by the warehouse.

Because she loved me, she had been scared shitless.

I finished my story as we pulled into the driveway of a three-story, Victorian house in Georgetown. I rolled up my window that I had had down so that my cigarette smoke didn't irritate Matt. I turned off the car and looked at Matt who was fast asleep.

I decided to let him get some more rest so I unpacked the trunk without him. Lindsay's parents were glad to see that we'd made the drive safely and asked if it was all right for them to wake up Matt. Within seconds, they were hugging him and shoving a present into his hands. It wasn't his birthday or anything; it was just something they did. As he ripped through the paper, I looked up the middle window on the third floor and saw Lindsay looking down at us with a smile on her face. She looked happy to see us.

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